Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair
Pablo Neruda(1924)
Extract
I can write the saddest lines tonight.
A body of water appears on nearly every page: ocean, rain, rivers, tears. Pablo Neruda published this collection in 1924 at the age of nineteen, and the poems burn with an intensity that embarrasses no one because it is utterly sincere. The beloved is landscape, continent, weather. She is the night sky and the wheat field and the sound of the sea at Temuco, the southern Chilean town where Neruda grew up listening to rain on a wooden roof. The verse moves between physical desire and cosmic loneliness with a velocity that only youth permits. The final song of despair is among the most recited poems in the Spanish language, a farewell so complete it becomes its own kind of possession. Love, here, is elemental before it is anything else.
If you loved this
Barrett Browning counts the ways with the same breathless devotion, but in Victorian corsets where Neruda writes shirtless.
Lorca writes from the same Spanish-language tradition of blood and moonlight, but the lovers are doomed where Neruda's are alive.
García Márquez fills a whole novel with the same Latin American passion Neruda distils into twenty poems.